February 2005

Fred is mentioning Kayak as his main search choice whenever it comes to looking for travel options. Just so you know there's also Mobissimo - an European venture funded by three VC houses: Cambrian Ventures, Index Ventures, and Benhamou Global Ventures. 

Unfortunately neither is relevant for the deals involving Romania - one gets quite expensive fares and (some of) the budget airlines such as Blue Air, SkyEurope or Jet2 (last two tie Central Eastern Europe with Western Europe quite well) are not included in the Romania-related searches. Not even Cimber Air is not in their list. Actually some weeks ago I wrote to the Mobissimo guys to include the few budget airlines operating throughout Romania and Central Eastern Europe but got no sign from them. Nor the airlines were included into the databases. I get so frustrated sometimes that Romania is not part of the game in this entire globalization process that's happening nowadays, I am sure it's just a matter of when and not of if. But the actual situation doesn't really make me happy. 

Anyways, it may be that Romania is not part of their plans or could be an operational inefficiency on their side as well.

...either better but still very frustrating or pain in the ass according to the latest poll that I just closed. The new one is about the way you get your news so please go and provide your input. Thanks. 

Or making a living from it -- read Tom's open letter with very substantiated points and principles which I believe represent the grassroots values for a profession that's emerging nowadays. It's very easy to set up a blog today - but it's not that easy to keep a professional and informative one. Creating value in the space that is.

An interesting article from McKinsey about the informal economy in Brazil, which allegedly stands at around 40% while the world's average is 32.5%. Sure, I have mentioned before that, Romania's is officially at about 30% but there are voices claiming a 38-39% figure representing the informal part of the economy. It's a good read, and if you wear the Romanian hat we do have similar root causes such as high fiscal regime, weak judicial system or corruption.

However, I believe that we have better premises than the Brazilian ones. Basically a company decides to avoid operating legally when the benefits outweigh the probability and cost of being caught. And the present government IMO tries exactly to push the companies not to consider this equation any longer - reducing the fiscality burden was the number 1 item on their agenda as well as making tax evasion a criminal offense. Equally important the judicial system needs to be more efficient -- creating a better one (transparent, more efficient and credible) is the #1 priority asked by the EU. And it seems like Monica Macovei, the Romanian minister of justice, has good chances to do that.

One of the latest HBS articles (ok, I have seen it being referred to in the blogosphere this week but got the chance to read it only tonight) presents Zara's strategical approach. It is strategy 101 exemplification of a company relying on a flexible production system (with three segments - women, men and kids), word of mouth marketing, (which is rather difficult), affordable and fashionable garments and high inventory turnover (frequent product changes). Those four variables are self-inforcing and create a system with sound attributes that Porter would claim to be an indication of the strategy continuity to sustainable competitive advantages: they show direction, present unique skills and they fit.

Informative.

It looks like the guys from USA Today mistakenly took Slovenia for Slovakia. And I thought that when it comes to Europe taking Budapest for Bucharest was the usual suspect for the yanks. 

UPDATE: Michael's got more.

Sofia's municipality will have a clock installed for counting the remaining time to Bulgaria joining the EU. Why do I mention this trifle - it's because Bucharest did this stoopid thing last year already. (via Seesaw)

Saturday reading (via pk) about the Google's story with spicy details and things to learn. (note: if the article doesn't download click on the "features" and pick it up from the list)

Just a question: who relies on mainstream media for getting informed or updated in real time? I think the trend is switching more and more from mainstream to micropublishing. Rapidness, relevance and reputation are the drivers here and the newspapers' online editions usually are updated once a day - that's what is happening at least in this corner of the world. But things change rapidly -- btw, have you noticed that EvZ got into vlogging? Well, almost, it's an infant phase, I bet the EvZ dudes don't even know it's called that way, but that's a start I think.

Ah, and here are the AP feeds. :)

Yes, Evan Williams aka Evhead, the founder of PyraLabs (known as Blogger) which he had sold to Google a while ago. He quit last year from Google and it seems like Odeo is his latest gig: "Odeo aims to enable this new distribution channel and medium by creating the best one-source solution for finding, subscribing to, and publishing audio content." Facilitating the relationship between the audio creators and listeners that is.

Read the story of it from Ev himself and the related blog if you care to see how a new cool venture is cooking.

From some clueless content writer.

UPDATE: some of the website's authors probably saw the referral links and made the proper correction. You're welcome dude. :)

Via Om - a very insightful interview with Euan Semple of the BBC DigiLab on how the BBC integrated those tools (that for many appear to be new or strange) into their daily workflow. First it was a bulletin board, then a social networking tool and thirdly a blog server with 70 blogs written by 100 people. Out of 25,000 employees the exposure is for about 30-40% of them. 

Yahoo Groups versus Groove --- the solution turns out to be a wiki from Social Text. A good read for people interested in the space.

more evidence on that from Gordon.

News in the making - Om's got the scoop though there's only rumours and nothing specific. The thinkg is that Om kind of smells those deals, so I tend to give him credit for that. Well, that would come at a time when everybody was expecting a Yahoo/Six Apart deal. All in due time.

Seesaw over at Balkan Scissors correctly notices that EU became some sort of a Babel Tower with officially 20 languages operating. Plus what's to come with Romania, Bulgaria or Croatia. That translates into a budget allocated to translation only of about $1.3bn - it's basically a sunk cost but helluva cash that can be directed towards better and more profitable projects me thinks. For a comparison, this figure is about a quarter of the last year's official FDI in Romania - 4.1bn euros.

I started a little experiment last night, like I wasn't busy enough. :) A new blog that is. In Romanian.

Interesting French company -- it's basically a middleman between the online retailers and consumers. The business model relies on getting the customers buy from the stores and Cashstore is getting a chunk from the transaction. Nothing new here except for the fact that Cashstore returns a part of the commision to the customer under the form of cash-back or discounts, whatever the name - it's a strategy that makes it very easy for the customers to earn/save a few euros, and simply is effective. It looks like Cashstore has a deal with more than 80 online shops (86 according to Rodrigo, where I got the scoop from) which is not bad at all.

Today Romania got its share of analysis on business, politics and more on FT. (reg. required unfortunately). You can read the entire version over at freeex though. Also, I have the doc version, drop me an email if you want it.

Here's a presentation (pdf) about how the global business environment evolves around three variables: efficiency (determined by the market incentives), social cohesion (aspiration to equity) and security (coercion and regulation). Very interesting plays at the global level with NGOs, media, politicians and trade unions as main actors. (link found over at the excellent Hattrick - which I suspect is authored by a Romanian living in the States)

The latest issue is out with excellent articles on the Romanian journalism, on how to spot a market bubble or why foreigners find Romania a better place to live than, say, London. Well worth the morning coffee.

Wow, I can't believe I spent the last two hours just re-arranging my feeds into new (and fewer) categories, as well as doing their periodical review of giving up some and keeping some others. Usually the net result is positive, more remain rather than get ditched which is a good indicator of blogs value I think. Well, I hope it will also reflect on some time saving when following them.

This came as a result of ending the testing period of a new rss reader for the last three weeks or so - Onfolio. The verdict - while I can definitely see Onfolio's value I found it rather complicated and a bit too inflexible to my taste. Besides being a resource eater. Definitely it makes a good tool for a power user but I am looking for a combination of simplicity and flexibility and so far I guess Sharpreader still gives me this, in spite of not being perfect as well.

News of the day in the blogosphere - Kottke decided to quit his web designer job and dedicate his entire time to blogging. I think it's a courageous thing, though there is a fine line to give up your self (be it objectivity or subjectivity) for potential advertisers (which he excludes from the very beginning). Actually how can money be made by keeping a weblog -- traffic capitalization, advertising or paid content are among the main drivers. As such, perhaps Kottke has more tools than living out of people's mercy/donations.

Anyways, given his popularity I believe he has good odds to make a decent living - though the "such optimism is to be admired, lauded and always avoided" phrase may be a valid point of view for risk averse people. Read the entire thread on the matter over at mefi.

UPDATE: btw, Kottke is not singular in his venture of becoming a full time professional blogger. There's a dozen of others - former FT journalist Tom Foremski's one came handily to my mind since I am reading him on daily basis. Also, as far as I know there's an American guy living in Romania (Cluj Napoca) who dedicated 100% of his time to blogging and who lives from donations from his readers. He signs as Soj and his blog - Flogging the Simian - was nomineed on the Southeastern Europe's best blogs category at AFOE a while ago.

I know that some of my readers are still students or considering heading to (under)graduate studies sooner or later. Over at Espen's blog (who was my technology strategy prof back at BI and one of the best throughout the program actually) you can find a cheat sheet for students who are interested in looking good in front of their teachers. It is mostly applicable for case-based classes (or very interactive ones) which are quite common in biz schools nowadays. Harvard was one the first schools that started teaching on case study basis (afaik these days ALL classes are taught this way at HBS) - actually, anecdotically, it's not unusual for Harvard students to wake up really early in the morning for getting a seat in the C-part of the class. Well, you should also keep in mind that this is not a proxy for serious studying though.

Here's a 5 minute-worth reading article about what is going on in Romania in terms of internet usage and adoption. Take the figures with a grain of salt, they are official stats after all, and usually they are deformed. (for example the e-licitatie $100 mil savings smells like b/s to me, also the number of pcs from the public administration may pose debates, Siveco kept the headlines with some preferential contracts awareded by the government -- but I digress) What is more important though -- look at the big picture and the trends, they are impressive I think.  Actually, (with a fair dose of optimism included) I believe that 2-3 years from now not only part of the Romanians' daily behaviour will be somewhat tied to the internet but also they will discover they could make money out of it. E-ntrpreneurship that is. The reason is simple -- Romanians may not be early adopters but they're surely fast followers and are creative in terms of money making. Besides, the newer generation is coming strong from behind with fresh perspectives. They may not be using or having the right managerial skills, but they're learning by doing and the learning curve is surely steep. Keep in mind that we're rather at the beginning of a cycle in our history, and everyday it is getting more interestingly.

It was just a matter of time - keep an eye on it and expect more to come. Apparently the first to take the challenge is ThinkEquity.

It seems like Hungarians are considering investing in development of IT centers in Romania (note: the Romanian IT minister is ethnic Hungarian belonging to the UDMR party) Could it be the grassroots of Central Eastern Europe becoming a regional cluster? It sounds like a far-stretched, idealistic thing and yet perhaps a good strategy for enhancing the Central Eastern European IT competitive advantages - very good skills and (still) competitive prices. Now that I come to think of it, there's no any "Silicon Valley"-like region, neither in Romania, nor in other CEE country (should you be aware of any, please do let me know). Or somethink like Sweden's Kista or Denmark's Symbion. Oh, yes, I know, there are some "technological parks" but they're mainly cost centers. Plus...

Nowadays, at least in Romania there are only a few cities with a certain number of IT-related companies - and they're expanding. They actually follow the university centers: Bucuresti, Timisoara, Cluj, Iasi, Craiova. It is the result of the increasing demand for software services mainly for leveraging the operating costs asymetries but what I would be really interesting in learning about are success stories of companies entering into the product development game. And I mean worldwide competitive. Like Interakt for example.

A very interesting presentation about rethinking the entire value creation chain in the case of a product-oriented startup. The underlying assumption is validating customers hypothesis and creating a strong base early in the concept/product development rather than waiting to have a beta version and build momentum at that time. [pdf]

Version 3 in beta of course and with three new features: translator, spellchecker and autolink. Available only for IE. Got it.

Check out a web collection for what was best in 2004 in terms of ideas, science, art, blogs and more than you can think of. Wow, I thought I will have a boring weekend.

A while ago I had a post about the typical profile of an angel investor, and I also pointed to the EBAN asa good source for learning more. Here's another (British) take providing a good perspective and, more interestingly, giving some perspective of the Great Eastern Investment Forum (GEIF) - a Cambridge-based outfit that holds quarterly meetings where up to eight start-up companies pitch for funding to between 50 and 100 potential investors.

We just got flooded with tons of emails from an Indian company selling offshore software development services. The company is Aditech Infosys and we got the same email for about 4-500 times. While we regularly receive on average 10 such spam emails per week especially from Indian companies, (but from other Eastern countries as well) I was surprised by the aggresiveness of this one.

Well, I read a while ago that the spam click rate was around 3% which I found quite high - though I had thought that this would be in the case of products such as Viagra, porn and the like. I have never imagined that spamming though would work in the software industry. The reason is simple: the software industry has as main drivers experience and expertise, and consequently the nature of the client/vendor relationship is going further than the transaction - it gets personal and on long term basis. As such, in the above mentioned case besides wasted marketing I believe this could actually turn against the company becoming a stain on its image and definitely putting questions marks on the management performance and strategy. Personally I would definitely not be interested in developing a business relationship with such a firm.

I would be interested to know if any of you is familiar with Romanian software companies applying the same sale technique. I am not.

Quite cool - welcome aboard! And btw - dudes, please get a cool domain name as well! :)

A friend of mine who is having a consulting company is looking to hire for an entry level position. Besides the business understanding he/she needs to be hard working, eager to learn new stuff and be able to think outside the box. If interested drop me a line and I will make the connections. Thanks.

Some of you may know that since the beginning of the year the Romanian currency appreciated against the euro with about 13.5%. While this is a sign of national economic growth, it is also a very dangerous thing for the Romanian companies which have revenues coming from abroad - and Krogos is one of them. It is a well known macroeconomic fact that a weak currency favors the exporters and a strong one puts the importers in a favourable position. Nothing spectacular so far, except for the fact that for 2005 the Romanian government predicted an average of 42k ROL for an euro (now it is 35.5k) while the National Bank's representatives just announced that it's likely to have an average of 33k. On top of that I heard some ("expert") opinions claiming that the euro would go as low as 25k. That's quite a difference I would say, and gives me some worrying grounds - basically it means a rethinking of the capital budgeting forecasted for the entire year.

So what can be done? One option would be hedging your revenues by getting streams from local clients as well, at least as much as it could cover the working capital needs. Two problems here though: 1. it doesn't mean you don't lose on the ROL appreciation and 2. there's no point in keeping foreign currency blocked in the bank - you still need to move the money as keeping it in the bank is a lousy investment, a very marginal return that is. And that involves changing euros into leis - again a losing position.

Another option would be directing the foreign cash towards purchasing long term assets such as equipment investments or such. While the software industry is labour intensive, it is obviously that besides the PCs (which are mainly commodities) there's no other equipment related to the core competence that would be attractive.

A third option (closely related to the second) would be investing in real estate. While real estate is one of the hottest areas to invest in Romania nowadays this could become a tricky one, especially for a company not in this biz. The reason is simple - except for the cases when you pay everything in one installment, (and I doubt a SME would have that kind of cash in hand) it can get very risky for becoming decapitalized, in the cases of small businesses the monthly cash flow is the most important financial aspect to keep in mind.

Any other scenarios that I'm missing?

Romania that is. (found at Horia's blog) Check out who the Romanian president is - for the people over at the Danish embassy two months after the elections. At the embassy from UK there's no mentioning of names, though there's a link pointing to the presidential website. The one from France is updated and so is the one from US.

Horrible day today - I am slow at catching up with the news plus that I am moody and grumpy. It could be very well the weather or pure and simple I need a break. It seems that I am not the only one on this boat though. Besides I am totally swamped with work and I have to catch up with tons of emails, so please be patient, I will answer sooner or later.

As such, ce soir instead of commenting I am just pointing to some stuff from around: 

- Jeff blogging live from Demo!

- a very interesting technology blog with a nice explanation for horizontal vs. vertical integration (via Fred)

- I have added two more blogs mainly related to branding and marketing stuff (discovered via Johnnie Moore's): BrandShift and Dig Tank. (The co-creation concept is very interesting, I have given it some thoughts myself either - also related to co-opetition) That would make a total of 223 feeds in my reader.

- apparently Skype closed an alliance with Motorola and Microsoft entered the mobile phone space by signing off a deal with Flextronics. That's not the first time when MSFT tries the mobile waters, a few years ago they actually had an alliance with the UK's Sendo, but the Brits went out at the very last minute - a story that ended up in court actually.

- I look forward to the Romanian version of UK's WriteToThem.com. If you don't know what that is check FaxYourMP.com first, it's the same gang.

On a funny note as today is allegedly a special day some of my friends were given half of the day off by the management of their companies to go celebrate it with their significant one. I guess that signals leadership or good management, huh? :)

You know, most of the critics show up after an event had happened - the "I told you" gang. Romanians even have a saying that the most courageous people show up after the war ended. Anyways - read and learn, some of the arguments are consistent actually. 1, 2, 3.

Got a couple of emails this morning from my readers making me aware of something which I should have probably kept in mind. :) Turns out that yesterday was the one-year mark for @rgumente. In figures that would mean 760 posts, a 1st place in the Romanian Blogging awards and a 2nd European spot in the best Southeastern European blog category.

However, more important for me, it was a year of intensive learning and debates with you about various topics from Romanian business, politics or music to Apple's or Google's strategy or cool stuff happening all over the place. Also, very important, via @rgumente I had the chance to have met both virtually and in flesh and bones some very interesting and cool people which otherwise I would have never been aware they exist. As such I think I am a lucky guy. :)

I am looking forward to what's to come.

Tavi emailed me this link to a solid knowledge base for entrepreneurs (and not only) looking for equity partners. You can find lots of basis covered there with how tos, business plan samples or checklists for starting a business, buying a business, expanding internationally and so on.

I was watching the webcast of Google's presentation at this week's analyst day and noticed the following slide presenting their competitive advantages. From a strategic point of view I would read it this way: we provide satisfactory (lots of traffic) and relevant (largest infrastructure) service acknowledged (brand awareness) by our stakeholders (advertiser network and great people) while having our users needs as our main focus. (focus innovation)

So without the brackets it'd be "provide a satisfactory and relevant service acknowledged so by our stakeholders while having our customers' needs as main focus." How about that for creating a compelling value proposition? More coverage on what had happened there over at SEW. (via Greg and Battelle)

I got an IM from a friend of mine living in London asking what was all the yesterday's frenzy from the Romanian Stock Exchange. Basically the transactions were stopped for a few hours. I had no idea about it, however I know exactly the reason - it is the announced capital tax increase from 1% to 10% - another step in harmonizing the Romanian fiscal policy. Of course that people being directed affected will always bitch about it, but all in all it is a good measure. Next in line is the increase of the real estate transactions tax. 

UPDATE: You can read an extended version about the Stock Exchange story in Romanian at ZF.ro. 

Turns out that 43 things was a (quiet) Amazon initiative for driving up traffic to its site. That's a stealth play, and it's usually specific to companies avoiding direct competition and trying not to step on the big players toes. Looks like it's effective for the big guys as well.

A few of you had sent me links to the story, thanks - I don't like to be in the "I knew it" gang, but I found it quite predictable ever since I saw the circus for the HP/Compaq deal a few years back. At that time she pissed off some heavy board members and of course they had waited for the payback right around the corner, it was just a matter of time. Turns out that it was right after the BOD on the preliminary 2004 financial release - which was a very good chance since the merger results were not as satisfactory. That's the sad truth of any organization - it's not only about the good management principles and vision, it's also about egos. Engaging all the stakeholders and making them happy is not an easy task. Such is life.

UPDATE Om: Why isn't the board being asked to leave? :)

Google map IS cool, I have played with it for two days now and it is incredible. But I guess you knew about it, it was the news of the beginning of yesterday. :)

This is related to an older comment exchange I had with Radu - apparently after all the deal was in the range of $20 mil, though nothing is public yet. Read here why.

UPDATE: More on the future model of Bloglines in the newly context over at Ross.

Don't miss them - that's a great opportunity to learn about some great blogs, mainly from US. Very-very good candidates. Anita is nomineed in the blog about small business category.

Wow, Umair's got it, it's an incredibly cool and useful tool especially for strategic business analysis junkies like myself. It's some sort of a collaborative weblog, but definitely it's much more than that. Actually they don't even call themselves as such, but rather make a parallel with a blog. Anyways, explore it yourself.

I guess it is a great example of blogs vertical application - a cheaper (close to zero) way of publishing specialized content which is massively distributed to the targeted audience. The beauty of it is that the audience GETS to choose it. I am just wondering how much time it will take until the valuable content will get monetized for - obviously now this and other similar tools are just some pioneers testing muddy waters. You know, the enthusiasm of doing a new cool thing. It's just a matter of time till a model gets figured out, and I doubt subscriptions will not be (a partial) component of the model. And, yes, of course it depends on lots of other variables as well.

Investment wise, of course. Silviu presents briefly and to the point what was the situation like back in the 90s and why the PSD government from the 2000-2004 term has no merit whatsoever for the economical growth. In case you didn't get that from reading my blog yet. :)

A nice economic analogy from William over at the Corner Solution: "Like it or not, one has to conclude that there is less of a sexual reward for advertising your intelligence for females.  Females generally don't need to signal quality to the extent that men do.  Remember, sperm is cheap, pregnancies are costly. This is why men favor quantity and women (tend to) search for quality."

Yeah, right, that's why my girlfriend broke up with me, her switching costs were low anyways. :)

...in the mobile phone industry, where the value proposition shifted from the service per se (e.g. calling or data transmission) to the user experience. Heh, big breakthrough - I buy a phone coz it's cool not for making a phone call. Anyways, interesting market approaches examples from Telenor and TIM quoted - the "sell the right phone to the right user" message creates a conflict of interests between the operators and the retailers interested in pushing the high margin devices. [link]

Before I call it a day, it almost slipped off my mind - a while ago I needed to rent a car. They say there's no such thing as bad publicity, well, this is, or at least it represents a fair warning: don't use cars4rent.ro if you need to rent a car in Bucharest or Romania. They're not serious. A day before needing it I was confirmed on the phone two times I would have been given a car by 10am next day. Of course that on that day at about 9:30 am I got a phone call from one of their employees claiming that they cannot make it since their boss changed his mind. I was speachless and got no other options, and since I needed the car for the entire day I had to rent a cabbie. Btw, cabs are fairly decent and reasonably priced, even though at times the customer service is not what one would expect. That's at least what's happening in Bucharest. Anyways, be aware of cars4rent.

It's been some time since I mentioned what happens in Romania these days. Here's a brief recap:

- apparently we have the first high profile corruption case solved with a 7-year sentence given to the former head of a State-owned agriculture company for a bribe of 59k euros. This comes right after president Basescu was complaining that all his official international meetings inevitably start with the corruption question.

- Ionut Popescu has convinced Dragos Neacsu to take over the Finance Ministry Treasury department. Neacsu is a high profile Romanian banker who formerly headed Raiffeiesen Capital & Investment. It is encouraging especially since a while ago Popescu had a hard time in finding good people.

- there's a newly open university center under a common Romanian-Bulgarian initiative. That's kind of cool, I would be curious though who is going to teach and what. Btw, I gave more thoughts to the learning blog, will hopefully launch a little project by the springbreak, finger crossed.

- more foreign money coming into the country either in manufacturing facilities from Austrian Triumph or in a (potential) portfolio investment in BCR coming from the Deutsche Bank. Nothing new here, expect similar news for the next months. Btw, they say that BCR will be finally privatized by the beginning of the next year. So many promises, so many missed deadlines. The closest interesting banking event is of course the soon-to-come CEC privatization with interesting competition coming from Austria. Also, there's more foreign portfolio investment in the Romanian Stock Exchange

- speaking of foreign money coming into the country - a couple of weeks ago I went to the IT BusinessMatching event organized by the Bavarian Chamber of Commerce. A very good opportunity, well organized and very informative. The two major Romanian type of partners the German companies were looking for were distributors of their own products (looking for new channels of course) and local software development at competitive rates of course. The Romanian side was well represented on both profiles.

- the figures for the mindless last year's governmental budget allocated to advertising were released - a short financial analysis shows us that out of approx. 4.5M euros spent almost a half went to Jurnalul National and Ziua. (5th and 10th in the number of readers ranking, and the first two in terms of resources they had gotten) Jurnalul is of course owned by mr. "blackmail" Voiculescu from PUR (yes, the guy whose party supported Nastase in the elections and who now changed its options with 360 degrees, and supports the former opposition, now in the government) and Ziua by Sorin Rosca Stanescu who has a reputation of getting "dirty" advertising deals. (read blackmail) Of course Evenimentul Zilei, which tops the number of readers at the national level, was given the least amount of money since it called things on their names - a lousy 30k euros that is.

- and speaking of the governmental spending on advertising, some big names from the advertising industry (Ogilvy, to be more precisely) had to retire to spend more time with their family or look for other opps. Word in town is that besides being given the Government account on the golden plate they were also too greedy.

- other than that, it's quite cold in Bucharest these days, after a last week full of blizzards all over the country, now we're facing the cold waves.

You have the details here, basically it is a close race between the center right party and the social democrats (an 11-vote difference apparently according to some polls, which IMO can be very easily manipulated in the Romanian context - but hey, it ain't Romania at all). Also, it looks like there's little difference between the programs of the two, so that an ousider may think that it all boils down to the immigrants issue. It is not only that - for a context you can have a look on Horia's details about the Danish parties POV's about foreigners (and what centrist extremism means in Denmark) as well as about the fiscality. (sorry, only in Romanian).

You can use Zopa, apparently the first online service cutting off the middleman (banks). It's basically an online market maker - quite interesting I'd say since it will force banks to become more competitive. It will be launching in the UK this month and it has a simple revenue model which is transaction-based (1%). Trust of course might represent a concern, but have a look at the management's background and you will understand that's serious stuff we're talking about.

Loic just went there on a business trip.

It's time for the 2004 awards given to the fastest growing technology companies in the Central Eastern Europe. Again no Romanian company has made it - the fastest was a retail Polish dotcom. See also my comments on the last year's awards.

My readers familiar with the US traditions know that last night there was the SuperBowl. My American friends certainly didnot miss it, I remember the times when we were dedicating an entire night at the bar to the event. More interestingly, from the business point of view though, it should be noted that SuperBowl has the most expensive TV advertising slots - it's become some sort of an ad mania contest whereas the companies would pour in big bucks in order to make a popular ad. (of course, if it's the most expensive slot, they should also look for the best return). You can watch all of the commercials here - I tend to agree that Godaddy.com has a certain impact. And btw, Godaddy is a dotcom company.

UPDATE: Read also an advertising "expert" opinion from some Forrester guy with an Ogilvy background. Note: take it with a grain of salt though, there's a lot of sarcasm in the advertising industry.

...by AskJeeves, which is among the 5 search engines out there. The decision will most likely be announced on Tuesday. Does it mean it's the beginning for exit for the 3-4 years ago visionaries who developed weblog-related products? It certainly means the start for blogs going mainstream anyways, I wonder what it will be next. Still, there's a lot of vertical integration to be made around.

UPDATE: I was of course curious about the figures behind the deal. Marc has the scoop: "The house pool says soemthing like $15M-$20M - but others say they'll take the $8M being offered them by Accel. But Stewart and Caterina don't GET the $8M, that would go into the company."

Nice example of business models which are complementors (academics call it the 6th Porter force) endorsing one with the other and creating a great value proposition: the Guardian NewsPoint. The Guardian is the UK-based newspaper which is one of the earlier adopters of blogs and NewsPoint is a RSS reader developed by Consenda. Nice strategic move with the Guardian especially since NewsPoint is in beta testing only.

Another (older already) example of complementing business models in this space is the French newspaper Le Monde and Typepad, whereas Le Monde online subscribers get a Typepad-powered weblog.

...or some interesting strategic plays for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Here's a good way of decomposing Google's business model, which is based on search ad and the AdSense program. Then read the implications of the latest Google's financial results, which, in case you didn't know it already, beat the analysts expectations by almost 10 cents per share.

You may be in the position of pitching a business idea for getting some funding - that's not the only context when you will have to prepare a pitch though. It may be whenever you will have to make an offer for a client or, even more importantly, when testing your product value proposition with your customers. Here are some of the steps to consider right from the beginning:

- Create and refine the idea
- Define the scope of it
- Decide who has the power to greenlight the idea
- Start with their perspective
- Structure the pitch
- Test the pitch
- Deliver it
- The pitch may fail what to do then?
- Do it yourself

For the details on each step read the whole thing, it's well worth it.

The product (Rojo) is in the blog  aggregation industry. (or RSS feeds perhaps is better put) I haven't used it myself yet, but perhaps it's something like Bloglines, with an interesting strategy.

It's been founded in June 2003 and launched the product last spring by invitation only - similar to Gmail's. It got some thousand users now, and those users get to have a limited number of invitations as well.

Basically I think that this product is making the following bet - all or most of the web-based content will be generated via feeds sooner or later and we're here for helping the users aggregating it the way they want it. I see it more or less as a web-based email client for RSS feeds. Of course the demand is closely tied to the RSS generators, probably blogs being the bulk of them. But not only.

Also interestingly, these days they got fresh capital via VC.

I just wrote a comment over at Radu's blog, and thought it may be interesting to have it here as well.

Generally speaking on one side [of a company] you have debt (D) and equity (E), and on the asset side you have working capital (WC) and long term assets. (LTA - i.e. equipment)

When you're looking for financing you look to your yearly projections and what exact needs you have both in terms of WC and LTA. If you project to have for example a higher than 100% yoy growth (in terms of revenues or the free cash flow to the firm) then that should reflect on the assets which should impact the financial leverage of the company (D/E ratio that is). It should be noted that the higher the leverage of the company the more riskier it gets (to default). As a consequence you will look for diverse ways of structuring your financial needs.

Now the debt can take many forms ? for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's just the bank loans. Usually those loans are the cheapest form of financing perhaps some 5-10 basis points above the State?s bonds yields (plus inflation) ? however, given the Romanian context, it?s difficult to get access to it since the collaterals should total at least 130-150% of the loan value. If the loan is intended for acquiring LTA then some lucrative deals can be worked out by having that asset mortgaged as well ?I worked on this kind of deals in Romania only with understanding bankers (yes, bribed that is).

The other option for financing your growth needs is bringing in fresh equity ? that means share dilution for the shareholders. One form is with the VCs - those guys offer a more expensive deal, usually 30-50% p.a., but in the ideal case their experience and rolodex should justify it. It is a very tricky relationship (see the venture capital archive at @rgumente) but it can certainly represent an interesting option for taking the company to the high level pretty fast (in a 3-5 years span). High level means at least 6 figures in revenues in Romania, of course it is more than that in US for example.

That's a brief situation about VC versus banks financing. Getting back to the post?s topic - being on your own is not an easy thing, it's a lifestyle, entrepreneurship that is. It sounds very nice in theory but in practice it takes a lot of hard work, commitment, perseverance and wisdom. If you?re interested in learning more, again I recommend browsing Argumente?s archives, I put a lot of useful stuff about it.

Actually that gives me an idea, which probably I should explore more seriously and perhaps I will make it happen this spring, at least as an experiment. I will set up a blog dedicated for learning ? some sort of an online entrepreneurship class. I need to structure it a bit ? probably it should be something similar to what Gabriela is doing with teaching about weblogs. I will give it more thoughts - what do you think?

I've been reading lots of stuff about it lately - here's an interview with David Weinberger talking about the long tail of the blog (yes, that long tail). Also, sorry for stating the obvious, but "having just attended the New Communications Forum, it is quite clear that corporations are going to have to get with it and incorporate both internal and external blogs (and wikis), or quickly fall behind in the game." :) I would say that nowadays it's more talking than money making, I'm looking forward to seeing various models with blogs as a direct revenue driver and not as an operational efficiency enabler.

Via Dragan - there's a new show in the blogosphere called Carnival of the Balkans, which represents the Balkan general version of the more famous (for me) and periodically followed CotC.

The first submission theme is about Balkan Music and Arts and the deadline is Fabruary 4.

While the blog usage significantly increased over the last years, there are very few business models centered around them which make sustainable and considerable cash. Most of them have an advertising revenue model with programs similar to Google's Ad-Sense. There are certainly exceptions, one of the last being Gawker Media's (a NY group of blogs founded by Nick Denton and which incidentally got seven nominees at the 2005 Bloggies) which just closed a very profitable deal with Sony for launching LifeHacker. This newly launched blog will write about the software of personal gadgetry and will be authored by people from Gawker Media. The deal is for $25k per month for 3 months and according to a:c it was done by the intermediation of BlackInc Ventures.

Similarly, Gawker launched Gridskipper - an urban travel weblog - sponsored by Cheaptickets.com.

The concept is not new (Blogversations comes handily into my mind) it's just that it has a bigger impact now. On the media of course. More on the story here or here.

Am I the only one who has 50 left? Would that mean that Gmail is looking for graduation soon?

...as a source of a national competitive advantage. I've had my fair share of arguments on the issue.

Via Jeff -- it's a cool service for dropping your files off and having them picked up by someone else at a later time. The file limit is 100 megs and the time limit is 7 days. It's an alternative for sending myself diverse stuff to the gmail account.

If you're in London or the UK and you're interested in some business, societal or political related issues about Romania don't miss next week's event centered on "the race to Bruxelles". It takes an entire week and it's organized by the LSE Romanian Society. The doc format of the program is here.

More fuel on the fire or the blog wars - the blog is yet another distribution channel.

Howdy folks, sorry for the inconsistent updates for the last weeks or so, things have been hectic lately and I had an incredibly busy beginning of the year. I am expecting things to get back to normal daily postings starting from these days.

In the meantime, the voting for the first European Blogging Awards ended up exactly tonight. @rgumente got the second spot in the best's Southeastern European section -  an honourable place I would say, given the lately inconsistent posting. :) My blog was voted by 69 people out of 267 and the category's winner - Histologion (a left wing commentator from Greece) - had 88. The title for the best European weblog this year is going to Michael's Glory of Carniola, one of the first European weblogs I actually have ever started reading. Congrats! You can see here the list of the winners by each section.

Also, for people understanding Romanian, don't miss this article about blogging in Romania, with opinions from Kit, Mihai, Tina and yours truly.